Finding a tenure-track job in the humanities is like throwing a dart at a map taped to a wall 50 yards away. There’s a good chance you’ll miss the target entirely, and even if you hit the map, your dart is likely to stick somewhere you’ve never heard of and never envisioned yourself living.
Like, say, our history department at the University of Central Arkansas. Imagine if your dart landed on our campus, and the prospect of spending your academic career in Conway, Ark. Would you be hoping for a second throw?
We’re used to that attitude from job candidates, having harbored such sentiments ourselves way back when we were on the job market. We came around, however, as do most candidates, once we bring them to town and give them the grand tour. Of course, Covid-19 made campus visits impossible this year. So how, exactly, does a department overcome those pandemic obstacles and recruit new faculty members to a place they’ve never seen and about which they might hold misconceptions?
Our department, in fact, recently concluded a successful tenure-track search. Serving on a hiring committee typically means attending extra meetings, studying scores or hundreds of application portfolios, interviewing strangers at a mega-conference, driving to the airport to pick up candidates, and other duties. Often lost in this swirl of activity is any sense of reciprocity. We expect job candidates to sell themselves without considering the need to sell candidates on our department, institution, and location. In a tourniquet-tight labor market, “we have an opening” is usually thought to be a sufficient pitch.
Not this time. Sure, our hiring process started out how it always does: One of us (Lucas, the department chair) named a search committee. The other (Welky) agreed to serve as its chair. We posted job ads in the usual places. The committee sorted through a mountain of applications. Rather than attend a mega-conference, we interviewed a short list of applicants via Zoom before selecting three finalists.
This is the point at which Covid really shoved us into uncharted territory. We could not bring finalists to our campus. No airport pickups, no meals, no campus and town tours, no walk-and-talks between buildings. While that might not sound terrible, it seemed a crushing blow to highlighting our best assets.
We’re one of those unheralded four-year public institutions that do a lot of good work in relative anonymity. We’re in flyover country. We’re a “directional school” rather than a flagship institution. We have 4-4 teaching loads and minimal research support. Few Ph.D.s have ever heard of us before applying. And did we mention, we’re in Conway, Ark.?
Campus visits allow us to showcase our amazing students, wonderful colleagues, and beautiful campus situated in a town with reasonably priced homes, good public schools, and all the daily amenities you could want. Wary candidates — and that’s most of them — often leave our campus feeling as excited about coming here as we are about hiring them. They leave knowing that we want more than a competent person to fill a classroom: We want a new member of our community.
That key idea often gets lost in the academic hiring process. A good on-campus interview is a dance between two equal partners, each wooing the other until their steps synchronize. Job searches are stressful for a department, but consider what they mean to the candidates. Hiring departments ask people to move themselves and perhaps a family to an alien location to work with people they barely know. We are asking them to surrender familiarity for the sake of a paycheck.
The on-campus interview was a great equalizer for our university. It neutralized some of the advantages possessed by wealthier institutions in more “desirable” locations. The pandemic blunted our edge. Hardly the worst of its effects, but one demanding action nevertheless.
We pondered how to replicate the on-campus interview’s critical elements in a remote world. We used Zoom meetings to replicate — in an inferior way — the candidate’s teaching and research presentation, discussion with our dean, and conversations with small groups of faculty members and students. Most departments that hired this year probably did the same.
But we also looked for ways to maximize our advantages and demonstrate our commitment to each candidate’s basic humanity:
- Recognizing that candidates would have to maintain their teaching obligations during our “on-campus” interview, we consulted them in advance and built Zoom schedules that avoided conflicts and included plenty of breaks. Because of these pro-candidate considerations, our interview lasted a day longer than usual but required less of a candidate’s time each day.
- To give candidates a sense of the many services available to them if they were hired, we set up extra conversations with some of our university’s special units, such as the Center for Teaching and Leadership, the wellness program, and the Center for Diversity and Inclusion.
- Providing campus and town tours — two essential elements of our usual recruiting process — proved more challenging. We considered doing Zoom “ride-alongs” in which we drove around Conway while candidates watched on their screen. This seemed more likely to induce nausea than to settle nerves about moving here. Instead, department members created PowerPoint presentations, with maps and images, that replicated our town and campus tours, and then conducted one-on-one “tours” with each candidate. This preserved the personal touch while situating each candidate in our environment and providing opportunities to ask questions about where we live and work.
Those steps were a good start, but we still worried they wouldn’t adequately convey what makes us unique. So we went further.
Before the interview, and with input from our entire department, we sent the finalists a goody box to introduce them to the campus and the town. Assembling the boxes became a team-building experience. Department members contributed menus from their favorite restaurants (with personal notes marking the best dishes), information about nearby recreational activities, the inside scoop on local stores, and other items that delivered a unified message: You may never have heard of this place, but life here is pretty good. Each box also contained some university swag (including a T-shirt; we had to guess on the sizes), departmental and college program brochures, and hot-chocolate and snack mixes from local companies. Our town’s Chamber of Commerce gave us some slick portfolios containing promotional materials and a welcome message from the mayor.
As a final touch, we jointly wrote each candidate a personalized, informal letter. We wanted to convey our quirky personalities, anticipate questions and concerns, and set a welcoming tone for the job interview. Rather than just woo them with the upsides, we also acknowledged potential downsides about the area. We much prefer that new colleagues arrive with their eyes open than be surprised by something we had avoided mentioning.
We hoped this box would make us stand out, make the finalists excited about their interview, and equip them to ask us better, more informed questions. We wanted to show them that we cared about them and that we understood how scary this moment can be. We wanted them to know that we understood this interview wasn’t just about whether they fit us, but the reverse, too. They could share the box with their families, who are as much a part of the relocation process as they are. We wanted the box to feel like a Christmas-in-February gift from a most unexpected source.
Was it worth it? We did hire our top choice.
But that’s an us-centered perspective. For our new colleague, our efforts mean he will arrive knowing that we value him as a person, not just a professor. That we value a culture of caring and of looking out for one another. That we welcome him to a place he’s never been and that his family has never seen. For his part, our future colleague said, “The decision to attach handwritten notes to each item added a personal touch that made me feel even more welcomed … during these times of uncertainty.”
A candidate-first model of faculty hiring will retain relevance in a post-pandemic world, especially if you, like us, work at an institution in a little-known location perceived as isolated. With budgets slashed and the Zoom interview released from Pandora’s box, administrators might decide there’s no need for on-campus interviews in future hiring. In addition, the candidate-first model humanizes a process laden with anxiety. It acknowledges that there are real people on the receiving end of our package who are facing a transformative moment in their career and life, and in their family members’ lives.
Besides, who doesn’t love getting free snack mix and hot chocolate?
